


The Language of Food

by KalicoFox



Series: The Adventure Zone Oneshots [7]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Cooking your feelings, Gen, based off a tumblr post, where taako and lup had an entire language based around food
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-13
Updated: 2017-07-13
Packaged: 2018-12-01 14:43:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11488539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KalicoFox/pseuds/KalicoFox
Summary: Taako's always cooked his feelings. It's what he does, and it's always seemed an easier way to communicate. The fact that no one else really seems to understand it is confusing, and frustrating, and something he's had to resign himself to.





	The Language of Food

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this post by timeforlupsopinion on tumblr-
> 
> "After like 300 years of living with each other lup and taako have developed like a language of food. Lup knows when taako is pissed and needs to rant about something because he made brownies, taako knows the difference between lup being existentially sad and lup being dead book character sad based on whether or not she puts walnuts in her muffins.
> 
> One day lup came into the kind of living space and was like hey guys i made cinnamon rolls, and taako was like cinnamon rolls? Because cinnamon rolls is what lup makes when she gets crushes. But instead of saying anything he makes quiche for dinner that night, which lup knows means “lup i know your fuckin secret spill it”. So the next day she made peanut butter cookies which she knows taako can’t eat which pretty explicitely means “fuck off taako” and they didn’t talk for a week straight"

Taako scowled down at the his latest tray of brownies, then shot an oblivious Sazed a dirty look.  
It wasn’t fair to the man, but then, Taako didn’t care. He was pissed, and _someone_ was going to have to pay.  
He couldn’t even eat the fucking things, since for some reason he’d decided that the only thing that would make the brownies actually appealing was swirling peanut butter through them.

“Oh hey, brownies!”

Fuck.

“Help yourself.” Taako said, his voice only _just_ too sharp as he dropped the pan on the table, “I’m headin’ out.”

“All right,” Sazed said absently, “don’t forget that you wanted to head out early tomorrow so that we could be in Lyrabar before dark.”

“Yeah.”

It was all he could do not to slam the door to the wagon on his way out, and the cool evening air didn’t do much to help him calm down.

It wasn’t right.

Every meal he made, no matter how complex or how simple was missing something. And no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t figure it out.

Not one single person who’d tasted his cooking had complaints. He knew that; he’d questioned quite a few people and interrogated Sayzed up one side and down the other, all to try and figure out what wasn’t there.

All of them said variations on the same thing; the food was perfect. If he added anything else, it wouldn’t taste right. It would ruin the balance. Nothing was missing.

 

Growling under his breath, Taako spun on his heel and stalked down the nearest alley, following the faint sound of water until he reached the bank of the river that flowed through Uthmere.

For a while he just sat there, fuming and occasionally shooting sparks off the tips of his fingers just to watch them hiss out on the surface.

The whole thing was just so stupid. He could admit that to himself, even if to no one else. But just…

How was he supposed to react? Sazed had grilled _trout_ to go with the spinach salad he’d thrown together. And yeah, okay, intellectually speaking that’s a perfectly fine pairing, but it just _grated_ on his last nerve.

It was like… like…

Taako paused, staring blankly at the bright red sparks dancing from one fingertip to the next.

What was it like?

Comparison after metaphor after simile flowed like water through his mind, and nothing caught. He couldn’t pin it down and after a moment he snorted, disgusted with himself, and flicked the sparks away.

It didn’t matter. It was just some fucking fish, and they’d come out all right, too. Sazed wasn’t bad of a cook, even if he didn’t have quite the flair that Taako would look for in a partner.

——

Looking back at it, Taako wasn’t sure how he missed the signs. He should have noticed something; Sazed had been quiet and withdrawn for weeks before Glamour Springs. But his cooking hadn’t really changed, so Taako had just… glossed over it; positive that it was a temporary disappointment.

Yeah.

Well.

Now he knew the truth, and he was cursing himself as an idiot for not having picked up on it.

“What are you making?”

Taako jumped, nearly dropped the cast iron skillet he’d been examining, and spun around with a curse.

“Dammit Agnes! Don’t sneak up on people!”

Angus smiled sheepishly and took a step backwards. “I’m sorry sir, I just noticed that you were in here again and I got curious.”

Taako paused, fingering the edge of the pan and arching one eyebrow at Angus.

“Again?”

Angus nodded earnestly, “Oh yes, sir. I’ve seen you in here a lot! You didn’t see me, because I didn’t want to intrude, but you’ve been using the kitchen every night for the last week, and the normal cooks are starting to complain about the missing supplies. I heard Francis complaining to the director earlier.”

Taako blinked, spinning the pan idly as he took that in.

“Does anyone else know?”

Angus shook his head, his face resolute. “No, sir. It looked like…” he hesitated for a moment, scanning Taako’s face as though trying to figure out how he might react to whatever he was going to say, then took a deep breath and plunged on. “It looked like you needed it, so I didn’t tell anyone.”

“Huh.” Taako spun the frying pan once more, then twirled it like he would if he were trying to show off with his wand. “All right then. Thanks kid.”

“So what are you making?” Angus asked, peering past him at the ingredients on the counter.

Taako shrugged. “Brownies, maybe.” He said, glancing at the ingredients he’d pulled out more or less at random. “Or fudge.”

Angus frowned slightly, the expression barely more than a pucker of his brow, and took a couple of steps to one side so that he could hoist himself up to sit on another, unused counter.

“Uh uh.” Taako said, reaching over and plucking him off the counter by the back of his shirt. “None of that shit. If you’re gonna stay and watch, go get a fucking chair or something.”

Angus flushed, but nodded and darted out of the kitchen and into the cafeteria as Taako turned back to look at his pile.

Brownies or fudge… fudge or brownies… fudgy brownies? fudgy brownies and fudgy fudge?

Eh, what the hell. Might as well make both.

An enormous scraping sound heralded Angus’s return, and when the boy finally managed to get himself settled Taako resigned himself to an audience.

 _Your first audience since you **murdered** all those people_ ,- a tiny, cruel voice whispered in his head, and Taako scowled fiercely, only just resisting the urge to try to shake the thought away.

“So um…” Angus said, pulling Taako out of his thoughts with a jolt, “I know that I’m probably not the person you want to be talking to, but… do you want to talk about it?”

Taako paused, an egg in his hand, and glanced over at Angus.  
“Talk about what, Jango?”

Angus shrugged uneasily. “Whatever is upsetting you? I mean, you’re making brownies, right? You always do that when you’re upset.”

Taako stared at him, his eyes wide, and Angus started fidgeting. “It’s just, I notice things. It’s part of my job as the World’s Greatest Detective, and almost every time I noticed you in here after hours, you would be making brownies and those times correlated with when you’d had a bad day, and so it wasn’t that hard of a leap to make, so I just thought I’d ask if you wanted to talk about it?”

For a moment, Taako felt like he couldn’t breathe, and Angus must have taken that as a denial of something, because he started rambling.

“I noticed other things, too, sir.” He said, twisting his fingers together in the hem of his shirt, “Like how when Merle almost died again last week you made beef flambè, the same way you did when Magnus ended up in the infirmary and almost lost his eye, or when I…” his voice hitched, “when I almost fell off the moon ‘cause I got too distracted by the latest Caleb Cleaveland novel to watch where I was going…”

Taako’s hand clenched into a fist.

He remembered that incident, and he knew for a fact that Angus’s new novel hadn’t been anywhere _near_ him when he’d nearly gone over the side. In fact, the only thing that could have possibly been distracting him was the soon to be _corpse_ that was one of the Bureau’s newest hires.

“Um, sir?” Angus was staring at him with wide eyes. “You broke your egg.”

“What? Oh shit!”

The time it took to clean up the mess of shell and yolk that ended up all over the floor when he reflexively dropped the egg he’d crushed gave Taako enough time to collect himself, and when he reached for a new one his voice was carefully casual.

“It’s not really a big deal. Just somethin’ from a few years back that popped back up on our last mission.”

“Uh huh…” Angus’s voice was neutral, and when Taako glanced at him his face was as blank as the ten year old could make it.

It wasn’t blank enough, though, and Taako rolled his eyes at the blatant skepticism in Angus’s eyes.

“It’s no big deal.” He said again, “Just something stupid. A gig in some podunk town went wrong, and I thought it was my fault, but it turns out my stagehand was trying to kill me.”

The last three words came out in a semi-hysterical giggle, and Taako froze, horrified.

“ _What._ ”

Was that Angus’s voice?  
Taako had never heard it so… flat. So completely expressionless. But apparently the floodgates were opened, and to his horror he couldn’t seem to stop talking.

“Oh yeah. So, get this. I had my show, right? Travel around, cook in this town and that village, it’s all good, right? And I couldn’t do it all myself; there’s a lotta shit involved in running a show like that, y'know? So I had a guy, a stagehand, and he was a decent guy. Decent looking, decent cook, just… decent, y'know?”

Taako’s hands didn’t falter as his mouth ran away with him, mixing and measuring and pouring out a truly enormous batch of brownies swirled through with cream cheese and white chocolate.

“But he wanted to team up, turn it into 'Sizzle it up with Taako and Sazed’, right? But I couldn’t do that, it didn’t work, it didn’t fit. Nothing he made fit right. It was good, but it didn’t _work_ , okay?”

The pan full of batter slid into the oven, and for a moment Taako hesitated, then his eyes landed on the frying pan and away his mouth went with him again.

“Don’t even ask me why. I don’t fucking know. I just knew it wouldn’t work, so I came up with some bullshit excuse about branding and how the merch was already just 'Sizzle it Up With Taako’ and told him no. That that was that, and I didn’t wanna hear about it again.”

Someone was laughing, sharp and bitter, and it took him a moment to realize that it was him. That he was the one laughing, and shaking, and…  
and there were arms around his waist, small and thin and boy-shaped arms, hugging him from behind as the… whatever it was in the fying pan scorched and burned.

Taako took a deep breath, then another, and carefully twisted out of Angus’s grip so that he could scrape the charring mess in the frying pan into the trash and start over.

“He poisoned the chicken I used for a show, a couple months later.” He said once he could speak without his voice wavering, staring intently at the sandwich in the frying pan. “Forty people died, and the only reason it didn’t get me too is because I didn’t feel like tasting it that day. I 'wasn’t in a garlic mood.’”

Another laugh, short and sharp and as bitter as the belladonna he’d thought for so long that he must have added. “Sazed must have been furious. All of that effort, and he still didn’t manage to off me.”

Golden and perfect, the grilled cheese is slid onto a plate and cut diagonally with the spatula. Another sandwich is assembled in the pan and slowly the scent of frying bread and hot cheese overwhelms the stench of burned food.

“What happened to him?” Angus asked quietly, and Taako shrugged carelessly, flipping the sandwich.

“Dunno. We got the hell outta dodge and he vanished a couple days later. I always figured that he didn’t want to be around someone capable of 'accidentally’ poisoning forty people and then running.”

He caught a glimpse of confused fury on Angus’s face and clarified quickly. “I didn’t know that it was him, see? I thought I’d fucked up with my magic. Transmuted deadly nightshade instead of elderberries or something, and it’s not like he was gonna say 'oh yeah, by the way Taako, all those dead people? Totally not your fault, I was just trying to kill you.’”

The second grilled cheese is slid onto another plate and cut, and Taako sighed, sprinkling both sandwiches with a pinch from the No-Sodium Salt Shaker before turning around and offering the plates for Angus to choose from.

“So yeah.” He said, sighing heavily as Angus carefully took the right hand plate, “The chalice was the one that told me about that. Showed me, actually,” he corrected with a mirthless snort, “trying to convince me to take it and turn back time. As if.”

He tried not to be affected by the fact that, even after hearing all of that, Angus didn’t even hesitate to take a bite of the grilled cheese.


End file.
